Get your documentary boot camp experience
We’re calling for you
AW welcomes all who share our love for documentary filmmaking as a vital, ongoing dialogue with the past, present and future. We’re looking for people with talent, passion, commitment, a voice of their own, and, above all, the ability to collaborate.
Our courses are designed for people with previous film and/or video experience.
Professional training that encourages the independent spirit, innovation, and creative risk-taking is provided by the most prominent leaders in the field.
Applications open March 25th – June 1st, 2019
in partnership with
Why
- You’re ready for one of the most intense learning experiences as a filmmaker in your life. Aristoteles Workshop is one of the precious few hands on documentary workshops in the world.
- You put your hand up for your make-or-break kind of experience. You’ll share that with some of the finest filmmakers of today, who did just that here in the past 14 years.
- You want to meet bright young artists like you. It’s all in who you work with.
- You need expert, full and edgy tutoring from voices shaping the documentary landscape today to help you find your artistic freedom of expression.
- One in three films we produced made it to festivals and received awards and honors, including Cannes Film Festival. That’s 24 awards in 14 years!
- You might just be up for the fish out of water at world’s end kind of breakthrough.
Fees
There is a €850 participation fee, which covers accommodation (including two daily meals), the use of the HD production and post production equipment for the full length of the workshop, as well as training, tutoring and eventual feedback from renowned documentary film experts.
Privacy
AW respects each person’s right to privacy. Your application data and your sample of work will be treated confidentially. Please be aware, if you are selected, your data, as provided by you, will be published on our website.
Deadline: June 1st, 2019
Selection to be announced by June 20th, 2019
Applications for the class of 2019 are now open!
After this workshop, it seems, to me at least, that everything is possible. Change my job, change my life …
The Tutors for the class of 2019
The Location
In Beliș. a commune în Cluj County, Romania. Mother Nature did a fine job crafting this place located in the Apuseni Mountains – an area full of history and mistery, often called ,,the sea between the mountains”.
It stands 494km NW from Romania’s capital Bucharest, and only 55km W of Cluj-Napoca. All major European airlines will fly to either.
Get a camera, shoot something, show it to someone… Sounds easy, doesn’t it? While cruel reality is closing in on us, Aristoteles Work- shop provides a safe haven where if you have a story to tell, you don’t feel as if the “powers that be” have put duct tape over your mouth, instead, you’re free to tell it, shout it even, and you have the means and logistics to back you up in your storytelling, thus making filmmaking as easy as one, two, three. I just wanted to thank you for the opportunity you gave me to learn and experience new things, be free in creating a film, and of course your infinite patience towards me. You gave birth to something wonderful, and I hope that this is only the begining.
Arne Bro
Vice-director of the National Film School of Denmark and head of its Documentary and TV Department, Arne Bro has been a guest lecturer in courses, seminars
He graduated from the National Film School of Denmark as a film director and scriptwriter. In 1988 he co-founded PENTA-FILM, a TV and Documentary film production company. He was
He directed for TV2/South the documentaries Ballesinis Modeller (
He served as a board member in the Danish Film Academy, The Danish Government Film Office (SFC), The Film Law Committee (Danish Film Academy), The Film workers Union (FAF), The Film Law Committee (The Film Branch, Film Directors and FilmWorkers Union), Jorge
Isidore Bethel
Isidore Bethel is a French-American filmmaker. A graduate of Harvard, the École Normale Supérieure, and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, he has screened work as editor and producer at Cannes (Official Selection), IDFA, the Museum of Modern Art, and the Pompidou Center, receiving Mexican Academy Award and European Film Academy nominations as well as a New York Times Critics’ Pick.
His work as
He has been a Lagardère Foundation and Jack Kent Cooke Foundation Fellow, a Tribeca Film Institute Network Participant, and a Film Independent, IFP, Berlinale Talents, True/False & Catapult Rough Cut Retreat, and Eurodoc Fellow.
He has also been an artist-in-residence with the Institut Français and the Villa Medici in Rome as well as a Guest Artist at CalArts, University of Kent, CUPA, Université de Toulouse, and Yale. He has taught at Sarah Lawrence College and Parsons in Paris.
Lotte Mik Mayer
Danish filmmaker, Lotte Mik-Meyer holds an MA in International Development Studies and Media Studies from Roskilde University Center and the University of Copenhagen, with studies at the University of Durham and
For the past 15
Lotte has many years’ experience filming alone in conflict areas like Yemen, Syria, Lebanon, Egypt
Her film ‘The Arab Initiative’ was about the difficult art of diplomacy during the ‘drawing crisis’, shown at a number of Middle Eastern film festivals, and shortlisted for the Danish DOX Award, in the International Competition, Docudays, at the Beirut International Film Festival and in addition On TV 2.
Filmography:
Return of a President – After the coup in Madagascar (2017) * Arab Initiative (2008) * What We See (2006) * Drawing (2006) * Tolerance and Participation (2006) * A Meeting and a Kiss (2005)
Laurent Bécue-Renard
French director and producer. He graduated from Sciences Po (Paris graduate school of political science) and is an alumni of ESSEC Business School. He was a Fulbright Fellow at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Arts and Sciences and a Fulbright Visiting Scholar at University of California, Berkeley’s Center for Human Rights.
In 1995 and 1996, while living in Sarajevo during the siege, he served as editor-in-chief of the magazine Sarajevo Online and published a series of short stories called The Sarajevo Chronicles.
After the conflict, he began exploring war’s enduring impact on three widows at a rural therapy center in Bosnia. The documentary he wrote, directed, and produced about them, War-Wearied (De guerre lasses), screened at more than fifty festivals and received the Berlin International Film Festival’s Peace Film Award (2001), among others.
Shifting focus to young men returning from battles in faraway lands, Bécue-Renard continues to explore war’s psychological aftermath with Of Men and War, the second volume of his Genealogy of Wrath trilogy.
Of Men and War opened at the Festival de Cannes (Official selection 2014), was nominated for Best European Documentary at the European Film Academy Awards 2014 and received the VPRO Award for Best Feature-length Documentary at the International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam IDFA 2014 as well as the San Francisco IFF Golden Gate Special Jury recognition Award 2015 among others.
I’ve learned a lot from people who became my friends. I felt connected to the rest of the world at the highest professional level, which meant a lot to me. A very generous idea, solid structure, a turning point for me, you learn, you get motivated, you do it, and in the end you have something to show. To quote Rafi Pitts, my teacher and friend, “if we don’t meet again that means that we are in the wrong business.”